DEATH SQUADS, REBELS AND JIHADISTS. By Andrew Selsky
CHAPTER 1: A ONE-WAY TICKET
In 1986, I found myself in a war in Nicaragua, reporting on a bizarre scandal that would shake the White House, 2,000 miles away.
But let me back up. How does a small-town reporter end up with a front-row seat to history?
The truth is, I had two things going for me: stubbornness — and luck. Woody Allen once said 80 percent of success is showing up. I wanted to be a war correspondent. There were wars in Central America. So I showed up.
It wasn’t easy.
The Associated Press had already turned me down once when I sought a reporting job in Madrid, telling me to get two years at a daily before I could even dream of foreign work. I scraped my way onto small Texas dailies, sleeping in my car before one interview. By the time I left the second newspaper, I had little money to show for it but I emerged with a wealth of journalism experience. I then won temporary AP jobs in Wyoming and Los Angeles. But the foreign assignment I craved never came.
So in 1985, at age 29, I gambled everything on a one-way ticket to Costa Rica. I contacted the Reuters photo editor for Central America and had a cheap Nikon, a few hundred dollars, and fluency in Spanish, thanks to my father’s CIA postings in Spain and Chile. My father — by then back at Langley — watched in dismay as I pursued what looked like a hopeless career. He urged me to try advertising instead.
I wasn't interested in advertising.
The photo editor, Hal Moore, agreed to use any worthy photographs that I might take. In San Jose, I checked into a cheap backpackers' hotel. The city was charming -- Spanish colonial architecture and big plazas with couples strolling hand-in-hand in the twilight -- but it was too damn sleepy. There was no sign that a war was on in neighboring Nicaragua. One day, I took a bus to the Nicaraguan border, several hours away. I was hoping to see something, anything, that might make a decent photo for Reuters. Nada. No refugees crossing the border. Not even a mule.
On the ride back, tears blurred the highway through the bus window. Had I bet everything on a losing hand? My résumé already looked like a patchwork quilt — teaching English in Spain, oil crews in Wyoming, odd reporting jobs. Was this the story of my life — bouncing around different jobs, moving on?
No. I wasn’t giving up. I had no Plan B.
I didn’t know it then, but I was about to start a four-decade career with The Associated Press — reporting from more than 30 countries, covering wars, coups, and disasters from Central America to Africa and beyond.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: follow your dreams. There will be moments when it feels hopeless, when the odds are stacked against you. Don’t quit. If you do, years later the weight of regret will be heavy. Give luck a chance to find you.
Two songs kept looping in my head back then.
Pink Floyd’s “Time”:
“…you are young and life is long and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”
And the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man”:
“He's a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody.”
I didn’t want to be that kind of man. I didn’t want to look up ten years later and realize I’d missed the starting gun. Instead, I was headed toward the gunfire.
CHAPTER 2: THE CHICKEN ABOVE THE SINK
I had come to Costa Rica because a Contra rebel group was launching attacks on Sandinista troops near the border. But I was realizing that by now, that group had largely become dormant.
I contacted Hal Moore, who suggested I go to Nicaragua to photograph Mi-25 attack helicopters that had just been supplied by the Soviet Union.
"No one has published a photo of these helicopters in Nicaragua," Moore said. "They're at a military base near the town of Matagalpa."
I grabbed a flight to Nicaragua.
Landing at Augusto Cesar Sandino Airport was my first slap of reality. A sign demanded that every visitor exchange $70 into cordobas at the official exchange rate - worthless paper compared to the black market rate in town. Emerging from the terminal lighter in cash and already heavier with regret, I made my way to Managua's bus terminal.
I was ill prepared for the chaotic scene. People were milling about on the unpaved ground, most of them armed with AK-47 rifles. Even nursing mothers had an AK slung over their shoulders. The air was thick with diesel, dust and sweat.
"Where do I get the bus to Matagalpa?" I asked.
A finger pointed to a crowded platform. There was no bus.
After a while, one pulled up and wheezed to a stop, triggering pandemonium.
The driver opened the door. Instead of waiting in line, people rushed it, pushing and elbowing each other to get a foot in the door. This was do or die, as if a volcano was erupting and this was the last way out. Babies were thrust through windows.
The next bus wasn't due for hours, so I dropped any pretense of proper behavior and joined the sweaty mob at the door. I was one of the last ones inside.
With a belch of black exhaust, the bus started up and rolled through the ruins of Managua, which had never been reconstructed after a devastating earthquake a decade earlier. As the bus climbed into the mountains, people chatted and shared food. The vibe was convivial, the frantic scramble already forgotten. We arrived in Matagalpa, in Nicaragua's coffee-growing country, at nightfall.
I found a rustic restaurant and was grandly handed a menu. The menu was long, but every dish I pointed to drew the same response: No hay. Finally, the waitress jabbed at a single item. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember the lesson: in Nicaragua, you ask what exists, not what’s promised on paper.
"I would like this, please," I said in Spanish.
My divey hotel had a tiny room with cement walls that didn't quite reach the ceiling. I lay awake listening to the muttering of neighbors and the restless cluck of a chicken outside my door. At dawn, I discovered its perch: a shelf above the communal sink, now splattered in droppings. So much for washing my face.
That morning, I hiked toward the Sandinista military base some four miles away, the sun beating down and sweat soaking my shirt. A woman by the roadside sold some colored liquid in plastic sandwich bags. I was so thirsty that I didn't care if it was Kool-Aid or guava juice. I bit off a corner of the bag and drank greedily.
A spindly tree provided some shade as I waited for one of the new helicopters, called a flying tank because they're heavily armored and bristling with machine guns and rockets. None appeared.
This trip was a failure. But it could have been worse. On hindsight, I was probably lucky that soldiers didn't accost me. I had no local press credentials and they could have arrested me as a spy.
Back in San Jose, I got a cheaper room at my hotel. This one had a silver-dollar-sized hole in the wall, which allowed me to see the stars at night and for the occasional mosquito to enter. Then came severe diarrhea. It must have been the questionable liquid I drank on the road outside Matagalpa. The toilet was, thankfuly, a few steps from my room. Little dots appeared in my vision, growing larger as I almost blacked out a couple of times. My fellow lodgers offered to accompany me to a clinic.
"You need to replenish your electrolytes," one said. It was the first time I heard that word.
I recovered, though, without medical help.
CHAPTER 3: CENTRAL AMERICA'S CASABLANCA
I needed to leave, but not for the United States. Honduras, on the north side of Nicaragua, was becoming a hot spot for news. A Contra rebel army was based there and was launching attacks into Nicaragua, with Washington's backing.
As my flight approached Toncontin Airport in Tegucigalpa on March 12, 1985, I looked down through my window at mountains studded with pine trees, bearing a similarity to Colorado's foothills. Passengers who were smoking stubbed their cigarettes out when the no smoking lamps were illuminated.
Suddenly, the plane steeply descended, contour flying so close to a mountain slope that the wing seemed about to scrape the tin roofs off shacks below. We hit the runway with a bang. Wing flaps extended fully and the engines strained as the pilot tried to halt the plane before hitting the end of the short runway. The passengers erupted in applause after surviving this landing at one of the world's most dangerous airports.
After clearing immigration and customs, I found a cheap hotel favored by visiting Peace Corps volunteers. The room was spartan but clean. Communal showers were down the hall.
Tegucigalpa's traffic-clogged streets were lined by shabby concrete buildings. The only American restaurant franchise in the city of a half-million was a Dunkin' Donuts
The armed Contras were far to the south, their camps arrayed along the Honduran-Nicaraguan border. Access was restricted, guarded by Honduran military checkpoints. Journalists who lacked prior approval to pass were told to go back to Tegucigalpa.
Tegucigalpa was a nest of intrigue, though. Central America's Casablanca, full of spies, mercenaries, rebel spokesmen and other shady types. Instead of Humphrey Bogart's Rick's cafe, there was the Totem, a bar where you could be elbow-to-elbow with CIA spooks, war photographers and adventurers, guzzling beer and playing darts. The owner's name was, coincidentally, Rick.
"I even joked with him about it," recalled Willy Ring, a Vermonter who back then was a stringer for Time Magazine.
Soon after my arrival, news radio stations and newspapers were reporting that a Swedish journalist, Peter Torbiörnsson, his daughter and Spanish TV cameraman Alfonso Aparicio had been detained by the Honduran secret police.
I was in the office of the spokesman for the Honduran foreign ministry, trying to pick up intel for anything that could be newsworthy. We had established some rapport. I brought up the case of the detained journalists, and wondered aloud where they were being held.
"You might want to check out the headquarters of the DNI," he said. "It's just a few blocks from where you're staying. Something might be happening there today."
I quickly found the headquarters in downtown Tegucigalpa. The National Directorate of Investigations, known as the DNI by its initials in Spanish, had carried out disappearances and extrajudicial killings of prominent trade unionists, students, campesino leaders and left-wing political activists. These human rights abuses peaked as Honduras transitioned from military to civilian rule from 1981 to 1984, according to Amnesty International.
But the unit kept committing human rights abuses right up until it was disbanded, in 1994.
When I arrived there, a distinguished-looking man with silver hair and dressed in a suit and tie was exiting the building. A Honduran journalist approached him with a cassette recorder and began asking questions. I'd arrived just in time, because the man was the Swedish ambassador. I shot a frame or two with my Nikon as a uniformed guard at the gate unslung his rifle from his shoulder.
Then I took a reporter's notebook from my back pocket and walked alongside the ambassador, jotting down notes as he spoke. We turned a corner and walked down a side street, the Honduran journalist flanking the ambassador on the other side, still recording with his cassette recorder.
After briefly describing his visit with the detained Swedish national, the ambassador bade us goodbye, got into a car and was driven way.
That's when the armed DNI officers pounced. They ordered us three journalists to come with them. The officers were behind us as we walked up the sidewalk back to the DNI headquarter's entrance. My camera hung by a strap from my neck. The police could not observe me as I hurriedly wound the exposed film back into its cassette, popped open the back of the camera, removed the film and slid it into my underwear. I fished into a pocket for a fresh roll, inserted that into the camera and advanced it a few frames, so it wouldn't seem like an unused roll.
Sure enough, after the three of us were put into a room, the officers demanded my camera and that of the Honduran photographer. Taking photos of the exterior of the DNI headquarters was forbidden, they said.
We three were left alone, sitting on chairs in the sparsely furnished room. I moved the roll of film from my underwear to a sock. I introduced myself to the two Honduran journalists, who worked for the newspaper La Prensa. They told me that before I arrived at the DNI, the Spanish ambassador had come to check on the detained Spanish cameraman and had left.
After a while, one of the DNI men came into the room and handed me my camera. The roll of film it had contained was gone. We were then released.
The next day, a photo of the ambassador flanked by the Honduran reporter and me appeared in La Prensa newspaper along with an article decrying our detention as a violation of freedom of the press.
CHAPTER 4: BREAKING INTO THE WIRE
I brought my roll of film to the Reuters office. Reuters photographer Nancy McGirr, a thirtyish American, processed the film. Nancy then looked at the "negs" and picked out one photo of the Swedish ambassador. She sent it to Reuters photo editors, to be distributed to the agency's clients around the world. Nancy predicted it would be especially appreciated by newspapers in Sweden.
It turned out that Nancy was about to be transferred by Reuters to El Salvador. Reuters was looking for a stringer in Honduras to fill the gap. I had a coffee with her and Reuters reporter Annie O'Connor the next day, and they agreed I could work for the British news agency in Honduras as a photo stringer.
A few days later, I was on the phone with the AP's regional news editor, Soll Sussman, in Mexico City.
Soll told me that, with Honduras becoming more newsworthy, AP wanted an American "local hire" reporter/photographer in Tegucigalpa. This designation was new to me. It turned out that local hire basically means doing the same work as staff journalists sent by New York but for a lot lower pay and no benefits.
I expressed interest in the job. I cared little about the money. I just wanted to earn enough to support myself and do work as a journalist covering conflicts. Working for Reuters as a shooter would have been fine, though here was an opportunity to also write!
Soll said he would check my references and get back to me. The job would pay $500 per month and a few bucks extra for each photo that AP used.
After Soll checked my references, including my bosses at my temp AP gigs in Cheyenne and LA, he told me I was hired. I was so happy that when I got on the street, I shouted "yes" and probably gave a fist pump. I was walking on air.
I filed stories on a Telex, a machine that emerged in the 1930s and allowed text messages to be sent over telephone landlines.
I'd either type a message or story live into the machine, which looked like a large typewriter, and a machine in Mexico City would simultaneously print each keystroke. Or I would first punch the words onto a reel of paper tape, each keystroke making a hole that corresponded with the letter, then run the perforated tape through the machine as it transmitted to Mexico.
CHAPTER 5: LOVE IN TIME OF WAR
One September afternoon, I went with Willy to a small bookstore in Tegucigalpa that sold American newspapers — a tired old place, its wooden doors gouged and its paint scarred by years of neglect. I was leafing through copies of The New York Times and The Miami Herald when two people walked in — a large man and a young woman. They turned out to be American teachers at the local international school.
It must have been love at first sight — on my part, not hers. She had a bright smile, a pixie haircut, playful eyes behind enormous glasses and a pert nose sprinkled with light freckles.
I suggested we go out sometime. She gave me a polite, noncommittal smile.
That evening, by chance, I spotted her again at the Totem bar. She was sitting next to Willy, who was vouching for the guy who’d hit on her at the bookstore — me. So, thank you for that, Willy.
Her name was Zoe. She was from Oregon, a state I’d never seen but imagined as all pine forests and misty mountains — the opposite of Tegucigalpa’s smoke-belching buses, clamorous traffic, and cracked sidewalks.
We talked until late. An easy-going manner. When I said something that I thought might be remotely funny, she laughed, the sound light and bright, like tinkling wind chimes. I was entranced. The conversation flowed easily. I didn’t know it then, but I had met the woman who would share my life — through wars, moves across continents, and forty years of everything that came after.
A week later, as the setting sun bathed a plaza in gold, we met in front of a colonial church called Los Dolores — The Sorrows — for our first date. We went to a white-glove Italian restaurant and found ourselves the only diners there. The waiters stood at the edge of the room, watching us as we talked and laughed. It should have felt awkward, but it didn’t. The world beyond those walls — the traffic, the politics, the tension — seemed to fade, leaving just the two of us and the soft clink of silverware.
Our life together has been anything but sorrowful. I still feel like the luckiest man alive that this beautiful, smart, adventurous woman fell in love with me.
CHAPTER 6: SHOOT A MONKEY
We crossed the Coco River in the heat at midday, the dugout canoe gliding across water the color of milky coffee. There was no checkpoint, no flag, no sign that one side was Honduras and the other Nicaragua — just the hiss of paddles and the low murmur of the current. On the far bank, two dozen Miskito rebels adjusted their rifles and vanished into the jungle.
I followed, slinging a pack that held my hammock and mosquito netting — though, as I would soon learn, not enough of it. A camera dangled from my shoulder. We hiked single file along a narrow, muddy trail. The jungle enveloped us, alive with a high-pitched symphony of insects. Shafts of sunlight pierced the canopy like cathedral light through stained glass.
The jungle smelled of rot and wet leaves. Monkeys watched us, chattering, as they jumped from branch to branch high overhead.
“If we get hungry,” said Commander Adan Artola, glancing back with a half-smile, “we can shoot a monkey or two.”
I couldn’t tell if he was joking. Either way, eating monkey wasn’t on my bucket list.
We reached what had once been a village. The place was mostly gone — a scattering of charred posts, bullet-pocked remnants of concrete walls, weeds reclaiming what had been paths. The Sandinistas had burned it four years earlier, after forcing forty thousand Miskitos from their homes. Now the survivors were trickling back to villages along the Coco to rebuild their homes and lives.
A villager named David Williams approached, barefoot and lean, his eyes scanning the ruins as if seeing the past superimposed over the weeds. “When we came back to Wasla, we found only bush. There was no village anymore. We had to sleep on the ground like animals.”
That night, we camped near the ruins. I strung my hammock between two palms and draped the mosquito netting over the rope. When I climbed in, the hammock sagged, opening the sides. A moment later I felt the first sting on my arm. Then another. And another. Then a whining sound got loud as they went for my exposed ear.
Idiot.
Here I was on the Mosquito Coast — with Miskito rebels — and my mosquito net was useless. I had no repellent. The insects tortured me for three nights. Sleep came in scraps, chased away by whining wings and feverish itching.
Each morning, we broke camp before first light, moving through darkness so dense I could barely see the rebel in front of me. The men navigated from memory, their silhouettes ghostly as the first fingers of light finally seeped through the foliage. A Sandinista soldier's voice crackled through the radio static: they knew we’d crossed into Nicaragua — and that a foreigner was with the rebels.
That meant me.
Later, tired and thirsty, we reached another village, this one coming alive again after four years. Women and children emerged from the huts, their clothes threadbare but clean. They greeted us shyly, offering slices of watermelon, red and cold, the sweetest watermelon I had ever tasted.
“These boys are fighting for us,” said a villager named Edison Washington Díaz. He smiled, but his eyes were tired.
As we rested, one of the rebels suggested to Artola that they attack a nearby Sandinista military outpost, so I could photograph the action.
I spoke up. I didn't want anyone to die for a photo opportunity. Not a Contra rebel. Not a Sandinista soldier.
“If you were already planning to attack, I’d photograph it,” I said. “But don’t do it for the photos.”
Artola nodded. There was no attack.
After three days of marching and visiting villages slowly coming back to life, we reached the Coco River and crossed back into Honduras. The roar of the small plane’s engine felt alien after days of jungle silence. The wind from its propellers flattened the tall grasses. G forces pushed me back in my seat as the plane lifted off from the dirt airstrip. The jungle faded behind us like a dream you wake from too soon — vivid for an instant, then gone.
But the scribbled notes in my reporter's notebook and the images in my cameras would bring it all back to life.
Back in Tegucigalpa, I collapsed in my apartment and counted the bites. More than seventy welts pocked my body. I got between my sheets and was asleep in an instant, my skin still remembering the jungle heat.
CHAPTER 7: GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS
One day, just over one year into my stay in Honduras, Soll called from Mexico City and said AP was discontinuing the local-hire position in the country.
Oh no! My heart sank.
But in the next breath, Soll said AP wanted to transfer me to either El Salvador or to Nicaragua. Both countries were wracked by civil wars.
My heart soared.
A few weeks later, I was on my way to Managua again.
I told Zoe we could make it work. She could find a job in Managua. If not, I'd leave, forgoing the opportunity to cover one of the world's biggest stories in order to be with her.
CHAPTER 5: INTO THE WAR
It would be different this time. Instead of being a freelancer sticking a toe in the conflict, I was going to Nicaragua as an AP local hire employee, with the backing of one of the world's greatest news agencies and editors in Mexico City with whom I had established good relationships.
The 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua left few buildings standing. One was the Intercontinental Hotel, largely due to its pyramid-like architecture. AP reserved a room for me there. The bathtub had a few inches of water in it. Careless housekeeping, I thought, as I pulled the plug and let the water drain out.
Turns out water was available only a few times per week. I was supposed to have used what was in the tub to bathe in. Water lost; another lesson learned.
Truth is, fighting never occurred in Managua. It was fought in the remote countryside, reachable on dirt roads that were often sown with land mines.
One day soon after I arrived, the government invited me and some other journalists into the war zone. We clambered into a small bus and set off for the northern hills. The bus stopped in a ramshackle town called Pantasma. Everyone got out to stretch their legs or take a bathroom break. Before we reboarded, one of the government officials said we would now be heading into truly dangerous territory and there could be an ambush. He offered us AK-47 assault rifles to defend ourselves.
Several of the reporters took the proferred rifles and slipped their arms through ammunition vests bulging with extra mags.
I demurred. I was a noncombatant. I was pretty green but I knew enough that arming myself would disqualify me as a neutral journalist.
At one point, the bus pulled over at a dusty hamlet. A little girl was sitting in the dirt, wearing a tattered dress. She was playing with spent bullet casings. I discretely aimed my camera at her with the long lens and shot a frame or two. The image portrayed war, poverty and children who have to endure it all. Then another photographer saw her and get close. The girl noticed him and stopped what she was doing. The moment was gone. I was glad I was able to capture it. A Danish aid worker later told me he saw it in the International Herald Tribune when he was visiting his country.
CHAPTER 6: THE BULLETS FLY
I got a close-up view of war in August 1986, one that could have cost me my life, when I joined Sandinista troops on patrol.
I had convinced a contact at the Defense Ministry to authorize photographer Peter Morgan and me to accompany one of the Sandinistas’ elite Irregular Warfare Battalions, known as BLIs. These battalions were the government’s spear against the U.S.-backed Contras. Ours was the Ramón Raudales Battalion.
We drove north to their base camp, where we found the commander, Captain Benito Arauz, lounging in a hammock under camouflage netting. He had a Roman nose, a dimpled chin, and the kind of relaxed authority soldiers trust instinctively. He studied the document authorizing our presence, then nodded. He had been expecting us. One of his battalion's companies, a hundred boys and young men, some barely out of their teens, was about to head deep into the jungle to track down Contras.
The next morning, Peter and I slung on our gear — two Nikons across my chest, a vest crammed with film rolls — and joined them. The battalion leaders told the troops to take care of us “with your lives if necessary,” and warned that if anything happened to us, they shouldn’t bother coming back. One mortarman, Isaías Guerrero, who had a mop of curly dark hair and a mischeivous smile, later wrote in his autobiography that the soldiers joked we’d certainly have enough “party and fun” to fill our notebooks.
The “fun” began with the march. For days we hiked into the mountains, hammocks rolled on our backs, boots sinking into mud. At night we strung our beds between trees, tying knots we could rip loose in a second if the Contras doubled back. The thought of it was sobering as I swayed in my hammock, rifle fire sometimes echoing far off in the dark.
By day the jungle swallowed us. We climbed slick mountain paths, sweat soaking our shirts, humidity pressing like a wet blanket. I drained my canteen. Purification tablets were useless because there was no time to allow them to dissolve. I filled my bottle from a brown puddle and drank it anyway. The soldiers, all a decade younger, barely seemed winded. Peter and I forced ourselves to keep pace. There was no other option.
Another journalist, who was not physically fit, once was on a similarly grueling patrol. He couldn't keep up and passed out. When he came to, he discovered he was strapped to the back of a mule, being taken back to base camp.
The soldiers Peter and I were with believed we were closing in. Villagers whispered that a large Contra unit had passed a day ahead of us. Two days later, the whispers became certainty: the rebels had walked the same trail that very morning.
We halted on a ridge while Lieutenant Carlos Flores, the nineteen-year-old company commander, sent patrols into a knoll covered with bright green palm trees. I sat on my pack, fiddling with the stopwatch on my Casio, the sultry air pressing down, stillness all around.
Then the jungle erupted.
Automatic fire roared from the knoll. The unit that had branched off had found the Contras. The rebels opened up with all they had. The noise was deafening. The soldiers near me leapt up and charged without hesitation, shouting, rifles hammering. I hit the dirt, bullets whipping through leaves above me, the sound of a thresher mowing crops.
This was my first time under fire. I realized my prone position offered no protection with the rebels firing into us from an elevated position. I was doing no good lying there.
I got back to my feet and returned to the path.
Flores shouted for Peter and me to follow the mortar crew. I took two steps and that was when the ground behind me exploded. A rocket-propelled grenade. The blast rattled my vision, and left my ears ringing. By sheer luck, the shrapnel fanned away from me.
I ran up a hill with Guerrero and the mortar team, heart pounding. A woman suddenly ran past and crouched against a brick shed, hands over her head, trying to make herself tiny as bullets whined past. I raised my camera, snapped, then turned to capture the soldiers — grenade launcher thumping, sniper rifle cracking, fire pouring into the palms.
And then it was over. The rebels melted back into the jungle, leaving two bodies. One Sandinista soldier's foot was blown apart by a mine. The adrenaline drained out of me, leaving only exhaustion.
We camped on a ridge that night. I swayed in my hammock, listening to bursts of gunfire in the valley as men stalked and hunted men. Just before dawn, a voice rose from the jungle below: “Help me! Get me out of here!” Soldiers dragged in a boy, maybe sixteen, with a hole in his leg. The Contras had left him behind. They gave him water and bound his wound. For him the war was over. For everyone else, it went on.
We fashioned stretchers for the wounded and slogged toward a road, rivers chest-high, cameras held above the water. I kept glancing at the men carrying stretchers, terrified one would stumble and drown his patient. Hours later, filthy and spent, we reached trucks that ferried us to Quilalí, a village in the heart of the war zone.
A dead soldier lay in the street, half-covered by a mattress. A jeep sat nearby, a bullet hole punched neatly through the windshield where the driver’s head should have been.
Peter and I had our story and our photos, but our car was far away, back at the battalion base. The only way out was on a troop transport. I had seen too many wrecked trucks along jungle roads, blown apart by mines or ambushes. For the first time, I thought I might not get back to Managua alive.
On the inside cover of my notebook, I scrawled a message to Zoe: "I love you." If I was killed, I wanted her to see it.
Peter and I were the only passengers in the back of the truck as it bounced down the dusty road. Hours later the driver finally pulled over, saying we were safe now. Peter stepped down, chalk-white with dust, looking like a ghost. I realized I must look the same. We laughed, the kind of laugh that comes only when fear finally loosens its grip.
On August 27, the day my story went out on the AP wire, Contra rebels ambushed two vehicles on a jungle road. Captain Arauz was in one of them. He and six of his soldiers were cut down. Only two survived. Arauz, the man I had first seen reclining in his hammock, became the only BLI commander killed in the war.
I made an extra print of the woman caught in the middle of the firefight and put it on the AP office wall. The negative went to New York because Time-Life wanted to run it.
A couple of weeks later, one of the BLI soldiers was on leave in Managua. He stopped by the AP to visit me. He looked at the photo on the wall. He pointed at Guerrero and another member of the mortar team.
Those two guys lost their legs, he said.
I was shocked. How could that be? I was just with them.
But this underscored that the fear I felt about riding in an army truck was completely justified.
Guerrero's truck had hit an anti-tank mine, killing several soldiers and severing the limbs of others.
Later, I visited him in the hospital and did a story on his slow recovery.
The war was about to take a very weird turn.
CHAPTER 7: DELIVERING THE DEAD
A month after I returned from the war zone, the bureau was quiet. Then the phone rang. The Sandinista Defense Ministry was on the line.
What would prove to be one of the biggest stories in the world had just found me.
The caller told me that a Sandinista soldier had shot down an airplane loaded with AK-47s and other weapons. But that wasn't all.
One American was captured. Two American pilots were dead, along with a Nicaraguan radio operator.
I held the heavy phone receiver closer to my ear. I grabbed a pen and notebok and began writing. I didn't want to miss a word.
But could this be a hoax? No, I knew the caller.
I got as much detail as I could, hung up and went to the telex machine to urgently file a story to Mexico City.
MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) _ The Sandinista Defense Ministry reported on Monday that a rebel supply plane has been shot down in southern Nicaragua and that the sole survivor had identified himself as an American military adviser in El Salvador.
I then sent other chunks of the story, so the news could be transmitted as quickly as possible to the thousands of AP subscribers - newspapers and TV and radio stations.
My story appeared in newspapers all over the world, including the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
The next day, I drove in the American jalopy that AP had provided me to the Government Press Center in Managua. There, the Sandinistas presented a bedraggled, shocked American, still wearing the muddy, torn clothing he had been captured in. He only identified himself as Eugene Hasenfus and his hometown, Marinette, Wisconsin, before he was led away.
Two days later, my Nicaraguan colleague, Filadelfo Aleman, and I were in the AP bureau - a single-story white and wood-paneled house at the end of a cul-de-sac. We had been busy filling in the gaps in the story, with contributions from AP reporters in Washington and Wisconsin. Aleman sat at a battered desk, smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper. Photographer Danilo Garcia was in the darkroom.
We learned that a Sandinista press conference was scheduled for later in the day. They didn't say what it was about. We decided that Filadelfo would attend and that I would go to the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry to see if the US consul and Hasenfus' wife Sally, who had flown in from Wisconsin, would show up as they tried to gain access to the imprisoned flyer.
After a short while, I spotted US Consul Donald Tyson come into the building. He refused to comment and walked away.
Then I heard a nearby radio begin broadcasting the press conference from across town.
What is it about? I went to the radio. There was a telephone next to it.
Eugene Hasenfus was speaking. He was saying way more than his name and hometown this time.
Way more.
The flights bringing weapons to the Contra rebels originated at a El Salvador air force base and were organized by the CIA, Hasenfus said.
Holy shit.
This was a stunning revelation. This was not some cobbled together operation by a bunch of yahoos. This was the U.S. government defying the Boland amendment - the measure that Congress had passed to prohibit lethal aid to the Contras.
I began writing down what Hasenfus was saying. AP had caught a lucky break because the journalists at the news conference would not be able to file until it was over. They'd have to get to land-line telephones to file stories to their editors.
Hasenfus went on to say that the flights originated at Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador.
I snatched up the phone, dialled Mexico City and asked for Soll. I told him I had urgent developments to dictate.
Soll got to a computer and I began dictating a story, forming concise sentences extemporaneously. It's a skill that any wire-service journalist reporting from the field should have. I added some of Hasenfus' best quotes that I had jotted down.
Soll fired the bulletin over to New York. Editors there then sent it to AP subscribers around the world. I dictated more of the developing story, hung up the phone and rushed back to the bureau.
Filadelfo was still not back from the news conference. I needed more quotes from Hasenfus that I would have missed while dictating the urgent developments to Soll and driving back. Our secretary, Mayra, saved the day. On her own initiative, she recorded the press conference on audio cassette.
I filed a beefed up story to Mexico. It was published in the world's newspapers the next day, including once again on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, next to an article about a Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Iceland.
As the day was drawing to a close, we got word that the Sandinistas were going to deliver the bodies of the two American pilots, William Cooper and Wallace Blaine Sawyer, to the U.S. Embassy. The sun was starting to set as I stood outside the embassy gates with a large group of journalists, some of who had flown in from Miami and New York.
Presently, a Sandinista truck came jouncing down the potholed road. The truck stopped. Some men jumped down, went to the rear of the truck and pulled out two cheap wooden coffins. Straining with the weight of the bodies inside, the men carried the caskets to the embassy gate as TV news cameramen and photographers jostled for the best angle. The men dumped the coffins at the front gate and drove away.
TV cameramen and news photographers, seeking the best angle, swarmed over the scene. One journalist stumbled over a casket and indecorously sprawled across it.
It had been a long and tense day. The sun had set a couple of hours ago. Peter Morgan dropped by the bureau.
Supermarket shelves might be bare, but one thing Nicaragua had an abundance of was very good rum.
I scrounged up two glasses, a bottle of aged Flor de Cana rum, twisted off the cap and poured us each a measure. The amber liquid went down smoothly, giving off a hint of butterscotch. The tensions of the day started to melt away.
The phone rang, jarring the mellow moment.
The U.S. Embassy was on the line.
We are going to make an important announcement. Come to the embassy.
So, my day wasn't over yet.
At the embassy, Tyson stepped up to the podium and claimed a "Sandinista mob" had been at the embassy gates when the two bodies were delivered. His furrowed his brow as he denounced this outrageous behavior.
But there had been no Sandinista mob, only journalists at the gates. I resented being called in to the embassy, when I should have been resting before what promised to be another busy day.
The Reagan administration had been caught with its pants down. US Secretary of State George Schultz said the plane didn't belong to the US government. This was a lie. Now the consul was accusing the Sandinistas of fomenting a mob. It seemed a feeble attempt at deflection. This story was not going to go away.
The bodies of pilots Bill Cooper and Wallace "Buzz" Sawyer were flown out of Nicaragua the next day on a commercial airliner.
"The two American advisers arrived as pilots and are leaving as cargo," Voice of Nicaragua radio commented dryly.
Soon enough, Hasenfus was put on trial before a "people's tribunal." It was in a room that resembled a high school classroom, not a solemn courtroom. On a typical day, Hasenfus was driven from prison to the site. A phalanx of Sandinista security officials, with a couple of them holding Hasenfus by each arm, hustled him into the courtroom past a crowd of journalists armed with TV and still cameras. He sat in front, looking on glumly at the proceedings, assisted by a translator. Hasenfus' wife, Sally, blonde and looking on helplessly, was a few rows back. One day, AK-47s, bent from the force of the plane crash, were shown as evidence. Spectators wandered in.
I caught the flu but kept coming, sweating through shirts, pale under the lights. My parents later told me they saw me on NBC News one night and my mother could tell I was sick.
One day, Griffin Bell, who had been the US attorney general under President Jimmy Carter, flew into Managua in an attempt to represent Hasenfus at trial. Danilo and I drove to the airport for his arrival, for photos and quotes.
On the way, a Sandinista military truck sideswiped my car. Danilo, sitting in the front passenger seat, had the window down and his elbow out the window. The truck banged into us and almost crushed Danilo's arm. These trucks were East German and called IFAs. The running joke was that IFA stood for Imposible Frenar Atiempo (Impossible to Brake in Time). This IFA didn't brake at all. It just kept on going.
Another day, a motorcyclist pulled out in front of Filadelfo's Jeep that I was driving. I couldn't avoid hitting him. He was knocked off his bike but was uninjured.
A Sandinista policeman took us both to the police station. After a couple of hours, I was released. The police officer admonished the biker to yield the right of way.
Hasenfus wound up being sentenced to the meximum 30 years in prison. But President Daniel Ortega pardoned him in December. I watched as Hasenfus, wearing a traditional white guayabera shirt and a broad smile, shook Ortega' hand as Sally Hasenfus looked on. Hasenfus went home to Wisconsin in time for Christmas.
Reagan and Vice President George Bush said they didn't know about the scheme to sell weapons to America's enemy, Iran, and use the proceeds to buy weapons for the Contras.
Congress held hearings, televised to millions of Americans. Nicaraguans also avidly monitored developments when they weren't preoccupied with exchanging tips about what stores were selling meat, eggs or milk that day and which gas stations were open. Ortega was among those gleefully watching.
In its final report, Congress blamed Reagan, concluding that "if the president did not know what his national security advisers were doing, he should have."
But Reagan didn't suffer any consequences because of this misadventure. He was known as the Teflon president for a reason: blame slid off him like a slick skillet.
CHAPTER 8: STARSKY AND HUTCH
Danilo and I used to joke that we were Starsky and Hutch, the two TV cops who tore around Los Angeles in their flashy Ford Gran Torino, red with white racing stripes.
Our AP car was the opposite of that. It rattled like an old sewing machine, coughed up smoke on acceleration, and had a suspension so soft it felt like steering a waterbed. Comparing it to a muscle car was like comparing Woody Allen to Rocky in the Sylvester Stallone movies.
But it got us where we needed to go — most of the time.
One weekend, Zoe, who’d landed a job teaching at the American Nicaraguan School, and I joined friends for a quick escape to the coast. On Saturday night we walked along the shoreline and watched the sand glow under our feet. The surf hissed, and with every step, the bioluminescent plankton shimmered blue-green, as if the cosmos was beneath us and we were walking on stars. For a few minutes, it felt like magic had returned to the world.
The next day we packed up and headed back to Managua, still in that weekend afterglow. The road cut through flat farmland, shimmering with heat. Cows grazed by the roadside. Dust trailed behind the few passing trucks.
Then the engine coughed once and died.
I coasted to a stop, rolled down the window, and tried the ignition. Nothing. The gas gauge read half full.
I got out and lifted the hood, staring at the motor, black with grease and ticking slowly, like a heartbeat that was slowing to a stop. I knew how to report on war and political strife, but not how to diagnose a dead engine.
And then, people began to appear. One man. Then another. Then three, four more. They seemed to materialize out of nowhere. There were no houses anywhere in sight.
Within minutes, a small crowd had gathered around the car. Each newcomer leaned in, peered at the engine, and offered an opinion. “Carburetor,” one said. “Fuel line,” said another. “Ignition coil,” said a third.
The debate grew louder, then sharper. A Sandinista militiaman strolled up, an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, and stood there watching calmly.
One man, a loud, wiry fellow, dismissed everyone else’s theories with a wave of his hand. Another took offense.
“You Sandinistas always know everything, don’t you?!” he shouted.
The word Sandinista was like a match dropped in dry grass. The argument flared instantly — voices overlapping, hands gesturing, faces reddening.
The air shifted. What had begun as mechanical troubleshooting turned instantly political. Voices rose, edged with the bitterness that divided so much of Nicaragua — not just Sandinistas and Contras, but neighbors, even families.
Then the militiaman raised his AK-47 and fired two shots into the air. Crack, crack.
The noise tore through the argument like a blade. Silence fell. Dust hung in the air.
One by one, people backed away, muttering. Within minutes, the field was empty again, as if the whole episode had been a mirage.
Zoe and I were left standing there beside the useless car, the smell of gunpowder hanging in the hot air.
“Only in Nicaragua,” Zoe said with a laugh.
A few minutes later, some friends from the beach happened to drive by and gave us a lift back to Managua.
The car was eventually towed into the city by oxen — a fitting end for a vehicle that had always plodded forward and didn't pretend to have any Gran Torino flashiness. The mechanics pronounced it dead on arrival.
After that, I bought a Peugeot 404 — a boxy old French number that looked like something from a de Gaulle-era newsreel. It wasn’t fast, but it had character, and it carried us through the rest of our time in Nicaragua.
CHAPTER 9: DO YOU KNOW WHO I WORK FOR?
January 17, 1966. A U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber collides with a refueling tanker over the Mediterranean Sea, just off the Spanish coast. Three hydrogen bombs crash to earth; a fourth disappears into the sea.
I am ten years old, living in a white stucco house in Madrid with my parents, my eleven-year-old brother Paul, and my three-year-old twin sisters. We don’t know it then, but our father is working undercover for the CIA.
Plutonium from the bombs scatters across a square mile of farmland, forest, and houses. Miraculously, nothing detonates. A frantic search begins for the missing bomb. Many Spaniards are furious, and protests erupt in Madrid.
One afternoon, Pop bundles Paul and me into the car and drives straight toward one of the demonstrations. From the back seat, I watch a crowd of a few dozen people, angry and loud. A man stands on the roof of a car, face red, shouting anti-American chants.
I remember wondering why Pop would take us anywhere near this. Only years later did it occur to me: we were his cover. A man with two boys looked like a father out for a drive—not a CIA officer observing a hostile protest.
Pop’s parenting style sometimes veered into what would now trigger a call to Child Protective Services.
When Mom was pregnant with the twins, we lived in Holland, where both my parents—Oleg and Irene—were deep-cover CIA officers. Pop would drive me from our house in Wassenaar to the hospital in The Hague, about seven miles away. I was six, fluent in Dutch.
He’d park our Volkswagen Beetle on the busy street outside the tall, brick hospital, leave me in the front seat, and head inside to visit Mom. The minutes stretched and warped. I watched strangers pass the car. He’s not coming back, I would think. Some part of me believed it.
To calm myself, I studied the metal dashboard—the curves, the sheen. I reached for the lever that engaged the turn signals, which would flip out from the sides of the car, like two tiny arms. When I was three, I began calling them klip-klops because of the sound they made. He won’t abandon this nice car, I reassured myself. He’ll come back for it, if not for me.
And then he would reappear, smiling, peeling back the foil on a roll of Lifesavers. He’d hold one out to me. The fear evaporated. I never told him.
The next time he left me in the Beetle, I was still afraid, but less so. Again, I told myself: He’s not going to give up this nice car.
Soon after, Pop loaded Paul and me into the our big, boxy Opel Kapitan family car one night, blankets and pillows in the back. He drove to the same hospital and left us in the car. The streets of The Hague were empty. Paul and I dozed in the back seat until he nudged me awake.
“I think there’s a man out there,” he whispered.
I knelt beside him and peered out the rear window. A figure—still and faint—stood half a block away, half-hidden by a lamppost. “I see him,” I whispered. “Maybe he’s not watching us.”
But I was glad Paul was with me this time.
We fell asleep again, hoping the stranger would stay where he was.
At dawn, Pop returned, beaming but looking tired.
“Congratulations,” he said. “You now have two baby sisters.”
I looked back out the window. The “man” was a mailbox bolted to the lamppost.
We moved to Spain the next year. I began calling Pop “Dad”—a more grown-up word for a father who seemed, in many ways, larger than life.
In Holland he’d been a businessman. In Spain, a civilian adviser to the U.S. Air Force at Torrejon. In Chile, starting in 1969, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy. In France, part of the Office of the Special Assistant to the ambassador.
All lies. All cover identities.
I didn’t find out until I was around twenty.
It was summer in Paris. The trees around the U.S. Embassy on Avenue Gabriel shimmered in full green. I was home from college in Virginia, working a summer job at the U.S. Information Service, housed in the aging Talleyrand Building—a mansion that still bore stenciled German signs from the Nazi occupation, a ghost of past horrors.
During breaks, we’d play ping-pong in one of the empty rooms. The place smelled of dust and old money. It had been owned by the Rothschilds until they fled during World War II.
One afternoon after work, Dad invited me up to his office—somewhere I had never been. It was on the top floor of the embassy. A heavy metal door with a combination lock stood open like the entrance to a bank vault.
Inside, the first thing I saw was a bulletin board covered with photos of men. A sign identified them as known KGB agents in Paris. Burn bags lined the trash cans.
The clues were all there. But I had spent a lifetime believing he worked for the State Department. Why would I think otherwise?
After he introduced me to a couple of colleagues, we walked out to the family’s brown VW microbus for the drive home to our apartment near the Bois de Boulogne.
Dad didn’t start the engine. Instead, he looked at me—dark eyebrows knitted, as if weighing something.
“Andy,” he asked, “do you know who I work for?”
A ridiculous question, I thought.
“Of course. You work for the State Department.”
“Andy,” he said, “I work for the CIA.”
Everything seemed to stop—the traffic noise from nearby Place de la Concorde, the birds singing in the trees, my breathing. My father was a spy.
Any misgivings I had about the CIA’s darker operations—including its role in the Chilean coup—evaporated in that moment, replaced by awe. Complications would come later.
I was sworn to secrecy. Even my grandmother didn’t know.
Paul had been told earlier. He was the golden child; I was the family rebel. At least until recently. By then I was a student at Virginia Tech and had shown myself dependable in my embassy summer jobs. Dad decided I was “a good kid” after all.
A couple of years earlier, he had reason to doubt it.
Just before we moved to Paris, I had skipped school, smoked pot with friends, and hidden in a closet when one of their mothers came home early. She found us crouched there like fugitives and promptly reported us to all the parents.
Dad was furious; I was defiantly unrepentant. It was the first time my parents knew I smoked marijuana, though they must have suspected earlier.
A few weeks later, my parents told me news that stunned and elated me: We would be moving to Paris.
I was a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School, in Annandale, Virginia. The principal allowed me to graduate six weeks early so I could move to Paris with my parents and sisters.
Before we left, Dad sat me down in my bedroom.
He told me he knew I smoked pot, but that I had to abstain in Paris. If I was caught, he said quietly, the entire family could be expelled. No yelling, no threats—just calm reasoning. I took it to heart.
We flew to Paris on April 28, 1973. Paul, then a freshman at the University of Virginia, stayed behind. I didn’t even think about smoking marijuana. I was too enchanted with Paris—its monuments, its neighborhoods, its energy. I attended Alliance Francaise to learn basic French.
But temptation eventually found me. Later that year, at the University of Maryland’s Munich campus, friends were smoking a spliff of hashish and tobacco. It was handed to me. That was the end of my abstinence.
Europe had its own drug culture. Students returning from North Africa brought back a brick of hash hidden in the gas tank of their car. It was wrapped so poorly that gasoline fumes seeped in. When lit, it burst into flame. The greenish hash became known as “gasoline green.”
I escaped consequences—barely.
One summer, after flying into Paris on TWA, I completely forgot I had slipped two joints into my Marlboro pack for the long flight. I had smoked one in the plane bathroom—back when smoking was allowed—but the second remained in my pocket.
I dropped off my bag in my parents’ apartment and was walking to a bus stop when two French gendarmes stopped me. Long hair, ragged jeans, scuffed boots—I fit the profile of someone worth bothering.
They said there’d been a nearby terrorist attack—an obvious lie—and began patting me down.
The joint. Damn. It’s still in my pocket.
One officer pulled out my Marlboro pack, opened it, and extracted the strange-looking cigarette with the twisted end.
Qu’est-ce que c’est? he asked.
C’est une cigarette, I replied evenly.
He looked inside the pack again.
I plucked the joint from his hand and swallowed it.
The other officer was distracted by traffic—Citroëns, Peugeots, scooters buzzing past. Neither had seen the sleight-of-hand. The policeman returned the cigarette pack to me and waved me on.
I walked away, got on the bus, and finally breathed.
But, wait a minute, were the gendarmes lying when they described a terrorist attack? This was in the mid-1970s when the terrorist Carlos the Jackal was carrying out attacks in Europe and specifically in Paris.
On June 27, 1975, he killed two French security agents and an informant in a Paris apartment. Could that have been the date when the gendarmes accosted me? I reach into my desk and pull out an old passport.
Gazing at me is the 17-year-old me, hair reaching almost to my shoulders, and looking a bit bored. I check the immigration stamps. No, in the summer of ’75, my parents and sisters came to the United States on home leave. I wasn’t in Paris then.
But I was there over the Christmas holidays in 1974 and for New Year’s Eve, the passport stamps show. It was the best New Year’s ever. Joyous crowds thronged the Champs-Elysees, shouting bonne année to each other and guzzling champagne and wine. I met a beautiful girl that night. We kissed passionately under the Arc de Triomphe. She was American, a high school senior living in Paris with her parents.
We lost touch in those pre-email days. But I told Dad about her. He found out her father worked for some kind of agricultural equipment company and would sometimes go to the Soviet Union for trade fairs.
So Dad asked the girl’s father to report back if he saw anything of interest during those trips. No useful intel ever came of it.
One summer, Dad was having the Polish military attaché and his teenage son over to the apartment on 31 bis Boulevard Suchet.
“When they come over, take the son to your room and hang out with him. Show him your records and other items of American culture, like blue jeans,” Dad told me.
It was clear to me that the Polish official was secretly spying for the CIA and was considering defecting to the United States, and Dad was making him and his son comfortable about the prospect.
Being a spy handler for the CIA wasn’t a James Bond existence. CIA officers didn’t normally slip into Soviet embassies or KGB officers’ homes, crack safes and steal secrets. Instead, it was a matter of getting officials from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries to provide secrets to their CIA handler, and to keep those secrets coming.
My wife Zoe once asked my father what his job was like.
“It’s 99 percent boredom and 1 percent sheer terror,” he told her. Doubtless, he was referring to times when he feared that the safety of spies he recruited and handled had been compromised, not about his own safety.
Looking back, I realize that my drive to become a foreign correspondent was a natural result of growing up overseas and having an appetite for risk and adventure.
When we lived in Holland and Spain I was in kindergarten and elementary school – too young to have any awareness of political events there.
All that changed when we moved to Chile.
CHAPTER 10: CHILE, A POLITICAL AWAKENING
In the summer of 1969, we moved from the leafy suburbs of Northern Virginia to the bustling city of Santiago. I had just completed eighth grade.
Santiago was spread out west of the Andes Mountains. The snowy peaks could be seen on days when the smog cleared. Those days were rare; prevailing easterly winds would trap polluted air against the mountains, keeping Santiago in a brown funk that could make the eyes water.
Down in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons were reversed, and so the school year was too. Paul and I were enrolled at Nido de Aguilas International School. My parents pushed the principal to let me go ahead half a school year instead of back. And so, at age 13, I entered the last few months of the freshman year.
The school was in a village called Lo Barnechea, just northeast of Santiago and in the Andean foothills. Later, Santiago would overtake Lo Barnechea in a tsunami of development.
The students were the children of foreign diplomats and businessmen and of well-to-do Chileans. On my first day at Nido, word spread that there was going to be a fight. The athletic fields were a few hundred yards down a trail from the single-story school buildings. I trooped down the path with other students to watch.
The fistfight, between an American and a Chilean high school student, was already in progress. The Chilean won. The white American kid gave up.
Then, his face smeared with dirt from the scuffle, he said, “I may have lost, but you’re still a spic.”
That should have earned him a punch to the jaw, but the Chilean boy just shook his head and walked away. The American youth was probably trying to keep his self-respect and sense of superiority after losing the fight. But his comment made him seem small. It was shocking to hear, and was my first exposure to racism.
That ugly incident notwithstanding, the students from various nationalities generally mixed well at Nido.
I would learn more about racism in an eye-opening Black literature course, taught by Mrs. Michael Anderson. On the class reading list: “Black Boy” by Richard Wright and “Soul on Ice” by Eldridge Cleaver.
I was a skinny, nerdy-looking kid. At school, we were required to wear white shirts, gray slacks and blue blazers with no lapels. Not cool clothing by the farthest stretch. But on weekends I could wear jeans and a traditional Chilean wool poncho, giving off a hippy vibe.
My pals and I had the freedom to travel around Santiago. The local currency, the escudo, was doing very poorly so costs for food and transportation were cheap for an American. We took city buses downtown, went to the movies, ate empanadas and had an occasional beer.
Paul planned a trip where he and I and my Canadian friend David Cooper would hike through the Andes to Chile’s border with Argentina. Surprisingly, our parents gave their blessing to this mad scheme. I was 14 or 15.
We three took buses as far as they would go toward the west, and Argentina. We emerged from the last bus on an unpaved road. The mountains loomed ahead.
We trekked for a while along the dusty road and came upon a rudimentary mining compound. The Chilean miners were just sitting down to lunch in a huge room with a roof but no walls. Benches were set before long tables. The miners were having stew, served in metal bowls.
They insisted we join them. Such friendliness, and kindness, was typical of the Chilean people we met. The stew was hot, and delicious.
We scraped the last of the stew from the bowls with our spoons, thanked the miners and bade farewell. Then, hoisting our heavy backpacks onto our shoulders, we turned onto a dirt trail leading into the mountains. Soon, a rushing river blocked our way. The trail continued on the other side, but there was no bridge.
There was only one thing to do: Take off our hiking boots and socks, roll up our pants legs and cross barefoot.
The water was snowmelt from the mountains. My feet instantly went numb. We crossed over, put our footwear back on and resumed the hike. The temperature dropped below freezing overnight. In the morning, the walls of our tent was brittle with a sheen of ice. The water in the cooking pot was frozen. There was not a tree to be seen in the barren, cold ground.
I wore my hair as long as my father allowed, which wasn’t long at all. One evening over dinner, he glared at me and said “Andy, if I don’t see you with a haircut tomorrow, I will skin you alive.”
He wasn’t smiling as he delivered that line. I never doubted his love, though.
He could be a bit of an ogre, as Mom noted more than once.
One day, I put a poster of a peace sign in my bedroom window, on the second floor overlooking the narrow street in an upscale part of Santiago where we lived. I returned home the next day to see it was ripped in half. My father, who supported Nixon and the Vietnam War, could not have shown his disapproval of the peace sign in a more emphatic way.
My education in international politics, and political violence, was about to begin.
In 1970, Chile was going to elect a new president. There was excitement in the streets. People flashed hand signals showing their support for one of three presidential candidates. On Sept. 4, 1970, Socialist candidate Salvador Allende won the popular vote. But because he didn’t win a plurality, Congress would decide the winner between the two top vote getters.
The CIA attempted to derail Allende’s ascent to power by backing a military coup. Gen. Rene Schneider, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, stood in the way. Schneider believed in Chile’s long history of constitutional democracy and in the military remaining apolitical.
The CIA backed an attempt by some Chilean army officers to kidnap Schneider, providing money and weapons. Instead, the plot went awry. Schneider was shot to death as he drove to work. A CIA officer told me many years later that he thought the whole thing was a hair-brained plot and that the Chilean army had screwed it up.
A state of emergency was declared. Schools, including Nido, were closed.
Dad warned my siblings and me that if we found a package in the yard, to not touch it but to inform him. He was concerned that someone might throw a bomb over the fence. He must also have been concerned that his CIA identity would be leaked, making him and our whole family a target.
Later, when the family was stationed in France, a French newspaper would publish my father’s name, along with those of other covert CIA officers stationed inside the US Embassy in Paris. Around that time, the chief of the CIA station in Athens, Richard Welch, was murdered after his identity was divulged.
In later years, Dad would not discuss with me the work he did in Chile. He was in the CIA’s Soviet-East Europe Division, the tip of the spear in the espionage battles during the Cold War. His job was to convince Soviet officials and spies, often working from Soviet embassies around the world, to hand over the Kremlin’s secrets.
But with President Nixon and his aides fixated on preventing a Marxist from being elected president of Chile, Dad may have had a hand in some of the dirty work against Allende.
Two years after we moved away from Chile, the Chilean military mounted a coup against Allende, resulting in not only the death of the president but of democracy in Chile.
I read about the Sept. 11, 1973, coup in the newspaper the next day. I was upset. Chile wasn’t some abstract place to me, but where I had spent two of my formative years. A place I had come to love.
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